"Take a mental picture of the Earth.

Now shatter that image into 600,000 fragments.

These fragments are carved out by road networks, which stretch across about 40 million miles of the Earth's surface. And environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb says there are new roads being built all the time.

"There are something like 15 million miles of roads scheduled for construction by the middle of this century," Goldfarb says. "So roads are ubiquitous and everywhere, and we're only getting more of them."

From "massive squishings" of amphibians to mass starvations and even the shape of some birds' wings, roads alter the wildlife around us."

Aaron Scott, Rachel Carlson, and Rebecca Ramirez report for NPR September 13, 2023. [2]